Herbert Krause made his most important contributions in his three novels about the American West and in his founding of a center for the study of the northern plains. In his first novel, Wind Without Rain (1939), he sets out in rich detail the cost in human suffering of the settling of one part of the frontier, the hill country of western Minnesota, where an intractable soil and a rigid religion can crush or warp the spirits of the sensitive--as happens with the central character of the novel, Franz Vildvogel. Recounting a young man's painful upbringing in a hostile environment, Krause's second novel, The Thresher (1946), is set in that highly significant era of transition in the economic and social history of American agriculture when farmers, accustomed to labor-intensive, horse-powered equipment, began changing to high-speed, steam- and gasoline- powered machinery. The third of Krause's novels, The Oxcart Trail (1954), is less...